I’d respond to your first points, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. You made a statement about evidence, I disagreed, so what definition am I missing? As for being on the same page as you, you seem to be all alone on it - I’d visit if I could figure out which it was, but all in all I’ll stay on the same page as the rest of the world.
I’m going to look for Wilson’s book - it should be amusing. But I’m not sure how far I’d take an endorsement by Philip K. Dick. I’ve been reading him, and loving him, long before he got lionized by Hollywood, and I have early Ace editions of a lot of his work. I have some of the later stuff still in my queue. But I’m not sure how firm a grip he had on reality, especially in his later, drug-addled days. I think he is a classic example of how someone’s problems can lead to great writing, but I’d just as soon not have them. In other words, I love his work, but I would have grave doubts about believing in anything he endorsed.
In light of what you posted before I don’t have to fear anyone else will even believe your pathetic insults:
Of course, **Voyager ** was not:
By the time Newton was growing metal trees, others that began to look for less mystic applications then developed chemistry, Newton did hide or code his alchemy research. Newton was not part even of the debunking of alchemy. Let me spell it out for you: You did lie in this thread.
I can not let you go away with this other item: if you insist that we have to look at the whole of a man, what does it say that a believer of mysticism only can rely on insults and lies to get their point across?
When I found out that you even insulted me on a thread I was not even a part of, you sure deserve al the contempt here and in other threads, you can not call that condescension when there is evidence (in the same thread) that you don’t know what you are talking about.
My only mistake here was to assume you would keep your word, In my last post I only pointed to what you did in this thread, your superior solution is just to insult.
I also did notice eons ago that Wilson in essence was not believing what he reported, you are just now coming clean, but not so much: as I showed on the Mothman prophesies (funny that you ignore that Wilson referred to a debunked prophecy here) indeed the ones that think that their books are serious do deserve scorn, the fact that you tried to defend something that even Wilson does not take seriously is pathetic.
You don’t believe this, but his and other mystic books also changed me, I already followed that path, as even Wilson would say: it is like bubble gum: it is good to chew but don’t swallow it.
Well it was endorsed by the New Scientist as well. I don’t know how much you like them or not.
Anyway it’s about parapsychology which is the psychology of belief in the paranormal, and it’s an interesting book. GIGObuster keeps spouting about the Mothman prophecies as though I claimed to ever have a strong opinion about them, which I don’t, so I don’t know what I am only coming clean about now that I wasn’t coming clean about before.
It’s a cool book and if you’re into the UFO thing I think you’ll really dig it. As he says in the Preface, he’s not trying to get you to believe in anything. As he says “I am a radical agnostic, I don’t BELIEVE in anything.”, and well he is one of the founders of Discordianism, so it’s hard to know what angle he really takes on things. There are a lot of things in that book that I related to, and something that interested me was the idea of the way memes flow. He talks about ‘pulling a cosmic trigger’ meaning that possibly it will affect things in some way publishing this book. It interested me because it very much described my state of mind growing up about subjectivity and not actually BELIEVING anything. Because the truth is, I am like the inverse of a Nihilist. I believe everything is true, but it’s more about finding what’s true about it, or at least what part of that truth is applicable to my life. I live in a pretty much constant state of suspended disbelief. I believe shit on a whim whether or not it suits my mood and I can discard my beliefs just as easily.
So what interested me about that book is how similar it was to my beliefs and the COINCIDEnce of it being published right before my birth.
My view on objectivity is that you can be objective about what you can see from your perspective, but you can’t be objective outside of your perspective, the only one who is objective completely is “God” which I view as the totality of all consciousness, being that only God can see things from all angles. Mind you I am aware that this God might be a psychological construct, but my answer to that would be that it’s not relevant, it doesn’t matter, because for instance, Money is a psychological construct but it still very much impacts the physicality of our existance being that it’s a motivating factor.
So I think that when reading Wilson’s book you’ll get more out of it if you recognize it as a treatise on subjectivity, and not something trying to teach about solid facts. He’s got some interesting things to say about conspiracy theorists, and about how they are people who oftentimes kind of make it halfway through what he calls the “Chapel Perilous” where one goes through self-induced brain change. He claims that Conspiracy theorists are not wrong necessarily, if you want to live in a world where everyone is out to get you, which neither he nor I really do. A lot of conspiracy theories make sense to me, to a point where I won’t just dismiss them out of hand, but I certainly don’t think that there is one vast evil conspiracy controlling everything. I figure that if there is an illuminati, they are involved in power struggles same as everyone else, manipulating energies, and pursuing their own agendas. I’ve seen a lot of conspiracy theories on the occult where they conflate Rosicrucians and with Skull and Bones, I think that the energies that each are working with are quite different. Now I am not initiated into either order, but from the level of examination that I have made on materials of both, I would say that Skull and Bones is on the Black Magic end of the spectrum and that the Rosicrucians are on the White Magic end of the spectrum, but that I wouldn’t make a moral judgement that white or black are better or worse than the other, because they are all a part of the totality, the intrinsic balance in the duality, so to conflate all occult orders as being the same is to completely lack nuance and not understand the subtle differences, as the pursuit of magick is all about subtlety.
What I tend to do is put myself in opposition to forces that pull too much in any particular direction. I am generally in favor of the balance, and I try to find myself a balance. Lately I’ve been doing much better, my depressive lows are not as low and my manic highs are not as frantic.
I don’t claim to be a scientist, I have no real desire to be a scientist, it’s not my path right now, I want to be a Ninja like Jesus. I do not disrespect science, science is how we elevate ourselves intellectually as an entire species. But I do not believe it is the only path to knowledge. I see it as the way we find a common ground through which to share knowledge as we all labor under the Babel curse*.
Belief is and should be transient. Science is one of the best ways to explain how Magick works. ;p I never really bought into that drek about a true magician never revealing his secrets, but I was born now, and not in a previous time where that axiom/cliche might have been more appropriate.
Erek
*(Subtle variations in the way we interpret language.)
I’m sorry I insulted you. But I must say that you have no idea what I believe or don’t because I haven’t shared it with you. I am just now coming clean? About what? I never said I believed anything about the Mothman Prophecies. Before I read that book all I knew about the Mothman Prophecies was that Richard Gere made a shitty movie about them.
You’ve been just as insulting, so lay off the victimization please. We got into a flame war, if you want to talk civilly we’ll talk civilly, if you want to continue the flame war then continue the flame war. All my insults about you say is that I was caught up in a flame war with you.
I’m sorry I insulted you because obviously my opinion of you does matter to you or you wouldn’t have spent this much time arguing with me about it. And I am perfectly willing to go on from this point and have more discussions with you, but you keep coming at me like I should defend positions that I don’t hold. Like you brought up something about some charlatan mystic I’d never even heard of before and asked me to justify it. Now you’re talking about the Mothman Prophecies, when that subject has never really interested me all that much. You’ve got this idea that I’ve been lying to you, when I haven’t. Certainly I have been wrong about some things, and I’ve been a dick in some threads, but that’s as far as it goes. Why is it that you would rather assume that I am lying than face the fact that maybe you don’t understand my point of view as well as you would like to think you do? I admit I have trouble communicating over this medium, but whatever, I’d rather talk in conversational tones to be honest.
Stop expecting me to defend things that have nothing to do with me. I don’t give two shits about the mothman prophecies, or whatever charlatan mystic did.
Amusing how you attempt to ignore that your lie I quoted was about Newton. In any case, the Mothman prophesies are an entire chapter in the Cosmic Trigger book, Wilson referred to it in other books of his, and he even recommended the original book by John Keel. The thing is, Wilson’s conclusions are to be suspected when a big hole like that is detected.
Wilson explored conspiracy theories not to expose “the truth” but to reveal the ways we construct stories out of our hazy perception of the world. Problem is, you mentioned his book as a good guide to understanding where you are coming from, no mention at all that for Wilson even if an idea is baseless, it might be fun to entertain it for an evening. Unfortunately, you are entertaining his ideas for ages now.
You pretend to have learned well, that you can’t be completely certain about anything; the problem was that with Newton you showed the complete opposite.
mswas, let me say first that I like you. I’m glad you’re here. There are few things more tedious than a group of like-minded people enthusiastically agreeing with each other, and while the Dope is generally the opposite of that, sometimes there’s a little more consensus than is warranted or interesting.
That said, I really have to take issue with your view of language and rigidity of meaning. To a degree you have a point, but there has to be a certain amount of overlap in our understanding of the meanings of words, or we simply can’t communicate at all.
Now, with this sort of thing:
you are simply out of line. “Fairy” is not a made-up word, it has a long history, and you must know that when you use the word, people are going associate it with A Midsummmer Night’s Dream and Peter Pan and the Cottingley photographs. So if you want to discuss fairies as “icons for archetypical concepts” you have to state that when you introduce the word “fairy” to the conversation!
If you simply state “I believe in fairies”, await the inevitable snarky responses, and then say “Aha! I was talking about icons for archetypical concepts, so you’re ignorant, close minded and inflexible”, you are guilty of exactly what you complain about. You have set a mystical semantic trap for us poor “rationalists”. You have no right to expect people to understand a non-mainstream meaning you’re giving to a word, unless you’ve established that meaning explicitly or by context. It’s just as unfair as people insisting that “God” has to mean a “bearded old man in the sky”, and then declaring that “God” doesn’t exist.
I happen to find this an intriguing concept. I first came across it w.r.t. Greek Gods in Cryptonomicon, when Hugo Root expounds upon it to Daniel Waterhouse as they shared a prison cell.
What do you mean by “experience” here? Can you give an example of an iconography created by a “rational scientist” such as myself?
You’re half-right. One thing you have to remember is, science is fundamentally pragmatic. We measure the value of our models and maps and theories by their power - how useful they are at making predictions. There are both benefits and dangers to this approach.
Maps make a nice analogy. Scientific knowledge can be likened to making maps of a territory. Which we can then use to work out how far things from each other, how long it would take to get somewhere, whether we have to cross any rivers, whether there are places to take on extra supplies etc. And the measure of the map is how good it is at serving this purpose.
Now, if someone makes a claim about something, a skeptic will NOT take the entirely neutral point of view that you do. Instead, they will “consult the map” to see if the claim appears reasonable. (The “map” being the framework of knowledge and models held in the skeptic’s own head.) E.g. people have claimed they can see things without a line of sight to them, “farseeing”. This is equivalent to saying that there is an enormous outlandish feature in the middle of a meticulously mapped territory, which somehow nobody has noticed. A glacier in New York, an elephant in the ballroom. So the skeptic won’t say “maybe”, he’ll call bullshit, and rightly so, despite not having investigated the claims made.
The danger of being over-skeptical is to confuse the map with the territory, or to regard the map as infallible. No map can ever be perfect or complete. There are areas which are very poorly mapped indeed, conciousness for example. There is plenty of territory still to be explored. There are also plenty of examples of people insisting the territory should conform to the map rather than the other way around.
The danger of being under-skeptical however is to ignore the maps, or to regard them as arbitrary. All claims are equal, and consistency with the map be damned. This is not only foolish, it is in some cases downright hypocritical. Because just as you claim that we all create our own “archetypal frameworks” (and maybe we do, I’m going to need a better idea of what you’re talking about before I’m entitled to an opinion), *I/i] claim that we all construct rigid, rationalist, scientific models, which we use skeptically. If you pour your beer down the inside of the glass to stop it foaming up, you’re being a scientist. You’re making a prediction about the way the universe is going to behave, based on a mental model, which itself is based on empirical observation. And if someone were to claim that you can slam the beer can around as hard as you like and then pour it straight into the glass and it won’t explode all over you, you might compare that claim with your own mental map of the way beer behaves and take a non-neutral view of it. That is what scientists do! That is what skeptics do! The behaviour of beer is a well-mapped territory.
Personal experiences are a whole other matter. We are limited in what we can say about other people’s personal experiences, and arguably we’re not entitled to judge them at all. So I can respect your personal experience of God, and I’ll take your testimony as a data point. After all, it took me four years before I could get those “magic eye” images to work for me, yet I was quite happy to accept the testimony of others that somehow there was a horse or a bowl or a maze there. Plus, this thread convinced me that people can have rather different experiences of the universe. (I’m a middle-ability visualiser myself.)
I was taking an extremist position to illustrate a point. I understand that we must have overlap. Now maybe taking that extremist position was possibly not the best way to go, it’s the strategy I chose in the past, so shrugs I gotta live with it.
Well I am not saying that the ideas from Peter Pan or the Cottingley photographs are incorrect. What I am saying is that Fairies are quite real, but as archetypal representations. Now there is a lot of semantic overlap in the way we view them. When people think of fairies they are most often thinking of a Pixie, which is the cute little one with the wings that is slightly mischievous but overall rather benign. Now people have a common conception of these things, and therefore people might be quite likely to draw you the same picture of them. Generally however, Fairies are represented as little balls of light that people interpret in their own way, but I do believe there are certain universal constants that denote different types of fairies in that each one represents certain memes. So when someone experiences a Fairy they are experiencing something very real to them, but their experience might be something outside of the phenomenalogical field of the rationalist. So what I am asking of the rationalist is to suspend their disbelief until further more conclusive evidence is presented, as dismissing something outright is as delusional as accepting it without proof, because the person relating their experience clearly experienced SOMETHING, but what that is to different people is subject to interpretation.
Ok, but rationalists scoff at the mainstream ideas of science as taught to people by hollywood all the time, and they are right to, if someone says some bullshit about computer systems or the way QM works based upon seeing Hackers or Event Horizon, then it’s right to call them on it. The reason things are mainstream is because they are very shallow notions of the thing in question. Anytime you delve deeply at all into a subject you have left the mainstream, because the mainstream only shows you what concepts are available to learn about, it doesn’t actually teach you anything about those concepts. So I think it is very possible for people to be interpreting the term fairy incorrectly, particularly when they are willing to dismiss the beliefs of an ancient religion they know very little about. I feel that you must know about something before you are qualified to dismiss it. It’s one thing to say, I don’t know anything about that and it doesn’t interest me, and quite another to say “all that shit is hoakum”.
Enoch Root, who is the Angel Enoch, one of the first men who never died because he was taken bodily up into heaven by God. Enoch Root serves kind of the same function in Neal Stephenson’s books as he does in Enochian magic, in that he comes down to impart ‘higher knowledge’ to certain people on Earth. And Daniel Waterhouse was in the Baroch Cycle, maybe you mean Lawrence Waterhouse. ;p The archetypal idea is a pretty common theme throughout occult circles through history, but it has come much more into the common consciousness in the ‘information’ age, where we are learning about the information underlying our physical world.
Well sometimes one is confronted by a grouping of memes. The best way to understand the correlation of these memes is to treat them as though they are conscious. (Mind you I am not stating either way that they are or are not conscious) One relates to the confluence of ideas/energy by personifying it. It’s an avatar, just like MsWas is my avatar on the SDMB realm. So you have the experience and the best way to comprehend it is by personifying it and talking to it. Now, it exists in your memory, which is of course a map, and not the actuality, so you pull it from your memory and bring it into conscious thought (like cache) and have a conversation with this fairy/spirit/entity/god/angel/demon/etc… but you are of course running both processes in your consciousness. You are both yourself, and the entity with which you are conversing, but the thing that most rationalists don’t understand is that there is a lot of knowledge locked away in our subconscious that we didn’t realize that we knew, because it has yet to be analyzed. Analytical people have a harder time understanding the idea of knowing something they have yet to analyze. The reason for this is because we experience so much, all the energy in the universe is interacting with us at any given time, what changes between different times and different places are the measurement of your relationship to them, basically where you are on the map and where they are on the map. I grew up in New Mexico until I was 18 in 1996 and moved to the East Coast, now I live in New York. The same map of the United States is still more or less accurate, but my relationship to different places and times has changed, but I was still in contact with the entire universe all at once no matter where I was. The gravity of the atoms in the Rocky Mountains still pull on my body, but there are other energies that are closer to me, such as the Empire State building that have a greater pull on my body now because of physical proximity. Now, both the Empire State Building and the Rocky Mountain are memes. (To me) One is a building that represents the strength of our capitalistic empire, our dominion of the world at this point in time, and is also one of the prettiest buildings in the world. The other represents ski slopes, watermelons (Sandia Mountains, Sandia is Spanish for Watermelon) and hollow mountains filled with Nuclear Weapons and top secret air force facilities, super colliders (Sandia Labs) etc… I grew up near the Monzana Mountains which was when I was growing up one of the single largest nuclear stockpiles in the world, and I knew this as a child, it was just a given, they were there, and if you went too far in the mountains a black car comes out of nowhere and tells you not to proceed. Lots of different representations of the same thing, but the MAINSTREAM map still just shows a mountain range.
Sure, I think Science is peachy keen, I was into astronomy as much as I was into Greek Myths when I was 12. What interests me is reconciling the two, as they have both had a profound impact upon me. For instance, I don’t think astrology is BS, because astrology represents the cosmic clock by which we keep time. Not too many people understand astrology so what the mainstream gets is a stream of gobbledy gook, but Jupiter has a Magnetosphere larger than our sun, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to believe that it’s relationship to your body at the time of your birth had a significant impact upon you. The easiest way to understand this is that the different signs denote what time of year you were born. I was born in December, at the start of winter, December 25th. Capricorn is a very stern and pragmatic sign, which in a lot of ways I actually happen to be, but it’s only a few days after Sagittarius, so I am affected by Sagittarius as well, which is very contemplative and sage, makes sense because it takes place at the dying of the year, when things are getting successively colder and the days are getting shorter.
Maps are great, you’ll get no argument from me there. After all I’ve never once said anything bad about science in these arguments. I like science because it gives us a common reference by which we can interpret the world.
Fair enough. But maybe the skeptic is calling bullshit when they misunderstood the person making the claim. This often happens, and then finally when the miscommunication is cleared up the skeptic goes “well duh.” and moves on.
Agreed
As my illustration about the buildind and the mountain points out, what I am saying is that our idea of these archetypal frameworks is determined entirely by our perspective in relation to those frameworks. As I gave some ideas of what those physical objects represent metaphysically, which are not determined as much by my relationship to them in terms of spacial orientation. And yes, I poor my beer down the side of the glass. I agree with you, I am simply saying that there is more to it than many want to accept. Like I could see a picture of the Manzano mountains and say it reminds me of Nuclear Weapons, and the skeptic might think I was being silly, but I know something about those mountains that he might not know. I cannot prove that there are/were nuclear weapons there conclusively because we cannot actually get there without getting shot by the air force.
I’ll check out that thread later. SenorBeef and I used to hang out in a chatroom together since we were teenagers and argued with each other constantly as well teamed up to argue with others. I’m interested in that thread. I’ll get back to you on my conclusions from it, but now my wife wants me to come eat lunch with her.
Mswas, I respect your intelligence and depth of thought, but you are making a mess on the SDMB. The syndrome:
You post.
Someone disagrees.
You go “meta” on the disagreement. This partly OK, as your examination of the disagreement, its nature, can be quite sharp and edifying, but…
Part of your going “meta” is being personally aggrieved by the other poster’s comments: You are misquoted, misunderstood, and mistreated.
You slide further into blabbing about yourself and your philosophy of things.
It’s now all about you, baby.
People here, including those like me who are sympathetic to your philosophy and way of thinking (and I’m grateful for your support of me in the “Dark Christ” thread, too), want to talk about poor little you all day long.
Further, you seem to be flicking your Bic in attempts to ignite the above process, as with the crapola “Moral Relativism” thread. Give it a break.
You’re smart, you’re insightful. Try not to be so goddamn narcicisstic. (And damn, you’re really churning out the long posts, ain’t you, buddy?!)
Yes, I got mixed up. It was Randall Waterhouse in the prison cell in Cryptonomicon, Lawrence’s (and Daniel’s!) decendant. And for some reason, I tend to mix up Enoch Root with Robert Rankin’s Hugo Rune. This isn’t the first time I’ve done that!
Can’t say I’ve ever experienced anything like that quite so vividly that it appeared to be a seperate entity. But I have had fairly intense, Smeagol-like arguments with myself. I have also deliberately personified aspects of myself that I wanted to overcome as “demons”. Still fighting the little bastards…
Hey, don’t take it out on me because you feel sheepish for getting my back and getting made fun of for it. I agreed with you in that thread, I posted as such, but you’re in a thread that is specifically about me. As for other threads when my viewpoint has been constantly assaulted by like ten people at once, well it’s hard not to make it about me. I find it’s a lot easier to not take things personal when the attacks aren’t personal.
The Moral Relativism thread I thought was good. So you didn’t agree with it, well that’s your choice. I still don’t think Osama bin Laden is more or less evil than GWB. If you choose to agree with the status quo on this issue then that’s up to you.
Aeschines So I thought a bit about your post. I just read an article about political bias and it clicked something that your post brought up as well as something that was going on for me over this weekend.
As I was reading the article I was thinking about my political bias and which direction it took me in as far as the two main parties. As usual I came to the conclusion that I share some biases of each party, but not enough of either that I can consider myself as aligned with one over the other.
So I thought about your argument about narcissism, and I realized that I have been very protective of my ego being a perpetual outsider to any kind of social grouping like that due to the fact that I have strong disagreements with many establishment groups.
I had a few discussions with people who talked about the ego-dissolving aspects of acid, and how great they were, but it was never like that for me. I always delved deeply into my ego with my acid trips, and explored in that direction. I was having an interesting discussion regarding ego with a friend of mine and I noticed subtle aspects of identity of things that he was missing as we talked. (We were walking to the grocery store and talking simultaneously) So as he left out little aspects of the identity of things I wasn’t able to understand him, and I would have to prompt him for more identifiers regarding what he was talking about.
I have found in my experience that people who talk about overcoming the ego oftentimes have trouble identifying things in the physical world. This translates into an anti-materialistic bent.
In some ways my extreme egoic position has helped me to shed a lot of external biases, in that I do not put people’s egoes in some kind of relative importance. This can be seen in the Moral Relativism thread, where I do not judge the American ego vs the Al Qaeda ego as being better or worse. I know that my valuation of the egoes of others is a completely selfish motive, like how I value my wife’s ego over the egoes of anyone on this message board, or will align myself with the egoes of my friends over the egoes of other people but in the end I know it is simply egoes with agendas aligning and opposing other egoes with conflicting agendas.
So narcissistic though it may be, this post is here to tell you a little bit about the understanding I came to regarding how I approach the whole concept of ego. The ego dissolution of Nirvana sounds like Hell to me, and is something I have never regarded as desirable, and have even made a conscious decision to avoid it when the opportunity is there to explore it.
I would say however that I am only more self-conscious of my ego than a lot of the people I am arguing with, and that disagreement is a clashing of egoes, and so I don’t try to pretend to take my ego out of the argument in order to give the ‘illusion’ of objectivity that is so popular in academic circles. I do realize of course that I could achieve a higher level of sophistication where I don’t create a situation where my ego is the focus.
I do not disrespect science, science is how we elevate ourselves intellectually as an entire species. But I do not believe it is the only path to knowledge. I see it as the way we find a common ground through which to share knowledge as we all labor under the Babel curse*.